2025 Becomes Apple’s Biggest Year for Services

If there’s any doubt that Apple is morphing into a services-based company as it prepares for the post-iPhone era, the company’s performance in 2025 should put those solidly to rest.

In a a special newsroom announcement, Apple’s services chief, Eddy Cue, pens what is effectively an open letter reflecting on how great of a year 2025 was for Apple’s services business. The numbers aren’t inherently surprising considering how much Apple’s services revenue had grown over the last five years — its most recent Q4 2025 earnings showed it eclipsing nearly everything else Apple does, coming in second only to the iPhone — but raw dollars don’t really provide much context.

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That’s because Apple’s “Services” category covers a lot of stuff. It’s pretty much anything that Apple sells that isn’t hardware, and it’s not just the stuff that it sells to its customers. For example, Google pays Apple over $20 billion a year for the privilege of being the default search engine, and that also gets lumped into the “Services” category, making up a third to a quarter of Apple’s overall revenue.

The App Store

Then there’s the somewhat controversial 15–30 percent cut that Apple takes from developers for selling apps and in-app purchases and subscriptions through the App Store. Most analysts believe that accounts for another quarter of Apple’s Services revenue stream, and recent changes in Europe forcing Apple to allow third-party marketplaces don’t seem to have put a dent in that. Pundits disagree on whether that’s because most developers prefer to remain in the App Store or if it’s simply that Apple is doing everything it can to levy fees on developers who operate outside of the official App Store, but it’s probably a combination of both.

Still, it’s fair to say that even with Apple’s commission, most developers are doing quite well. After all, Apple may be taking up to 30 percent, the developers are still going home with the rest, and that’s certainly how Apple would like us to see it, as Cue highlights in today’s announcement:

Apple goes on to note that the money Apple pays out to developers “represents just a fraction” of the amount of money pouring through the ecosystem, citing $1.3 trillion in “developer billings and sales” in 2024 alone, over 90 percent of which involved no commissions to Apple. That’s likely referring to sales of things like physical goods, but it remains an open question whether Apple can really take full credit for somebody using the Amazon iPhone app to make a purchase. In that case, the app certainly made it easier to buy something on the go, and has likely also facilitated more than a few impulse purchases, but it’s not like an app from the App Store is the only way to buy stuff.

The Tangible Apple Services

While Apple runs the App Store, it mostly sits as a middleman between users and developers. Apple gets partial credit for running the marketplace, but it’s the apps that are what makes it truly great.

On the other hand, Apple offers its own set of first-party services, and in many cases it doesn’t just provide the service — it also finances and produces the content on those services.

Apple Music and Apple News+ are the only two real exceptions here, but even those have a great deal of Apple involvement. Apple licenses music like any other streaming service, but it also runs its own set of radio stations and has an editorial department that highly curates content like playlists. The company has also produced several music documentaries and other shows like Carpool Karaoke under the Apple Music brand over the years. Apple News+ is more literally just feeding up news and magazines from other sources, but again there is some editorial curation and spotlighting, plus Apple’s first-party Puzzles like Crosswords, Sudoku, and the new Emoji game.

Then there’s Apple TV, Apple Arcade, and Apple Fitness+, all of which are 100% Apple initiatives. Outside studios produce films, TV shows, and games, but all of these projects are selected and funded by Apple. There are some older franchises on Apple TV, like Peanuts and Fraggle Rock, but those back catalogs exist to support new Apple Originals. Similarly, Apple has selected older “App Store Greats” for Apple Arcade, but it’s funded the redevelopment of these to remove all in-app purchases and ads to fit with the Apple Arcade model.

Cue also notes that Apple Arcade added 50 new titles in 2025, while Apple TV “eclipsed all prior viewership records” in December, Apple Music reached “all-time highs in both listenership and new subscribers,” and Apple Fitness+ went truly global with an expansion to 28 additional countries and regions, bringing the total to 49 around the globe.

Here’s a rundown of the highlights:

1. Apple TV’s engagement was up 36 percent compared to the previous year, likely driven by the streaming release of F1, which in itself marked a banner year for Apple when it became the company’s first summer blockbuster, giving other feature films a run for their money. Pluribus has also become Apple TV’s most-watched show, and the announcement credits The Family Plan 2 and A Charlie Brown Christmas as contributing to the record viewership. It also won big at the Emmys, and has continued to rack up additional awards for shows like Severance and The Studio, which has broken nearly all records to date for a freshman comedy series.
2. Apple Music celebrated its 10th anniversary last year with the opening of a brand new state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles and several new features in iOS 26 such as AutoMix and the iPhone-mic-powered Apple Music Sing. According to Apple, the most “sung” song on the virtual karaoke service, was Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.” Apple adds that Apple Music-adjacent service Shazam also generated over one billion recognitions per month.
3. Apple Arcade gained some hit titles in 2025, including PGA TOUR Pro Golf, SpongeBob: Patty Pursuit, Cult of the Lamb, and PowerWash Simulator. Existing hits like Sneaky Sasquatch and Hello Kitty Island Adventure also received significant updates, along with hundreds of other games.
4. Apple Fitness+ saw the aforementioned expansion that effectively doubled its footprint, going from 21 countries and regions to 49, using AI-generated foreign language dubs that are based on the actual voice of each of the 28 Fitness+ trainers. It now offers more than 8,000 workouts and meditations, all in 4K Ultra HD, plus the ability to workout with the AirPods Pro 3 as heart rate sensors.
5. Apple News also celebrated its 10th anniversary as an aggregator (although the paid “News+” tier didn’t arrive until 2019), continuing to be the number one news app in the US, Canada, and Australia, while taking the number two spot in the UK. Apple News+ also gained a new Food section with 100,000 recipes from 60 publications in the four countries where it’s available (excluding French-speaking Canada, for now), along with the Emoji Game in the US and Canada. It also now includes over 150 local news feeds across 50 US states, seven Canadian markets, and London.
6. Apple Podcasts had its best year in 2025, marking its 20th anniversary by breaking records for listeners, plays, and subscribers. Recent enhancements such as enhanced dialogue, automatic transcription in 13 languages, and automatic chapter markers likely helped drive this.
7. Apple Pay makes a surprising amount of money for Apple behind the scenes, based on its scale: taking a tiny fraction of every transaction adds up when you’re handling billions of transactions. According to Cue, Apple Pay was used for over $100 billion in sales and “made a significant impact by eliminating well over $1 billion in fraud.” Notably, while consumer spending levels went up overall during last year’s peak holiday shopping period, Apple Pay was used even more often than other methods.
8. Apple Wallet is where Apple Pay lives, but there’s also more to it than just credit and debit cards. Apple also introduced Digital ID that allows an identity card to be created for any US passport holder, added support for Japan’s My Number national identity card, and raised the number of states that support local driver’s licenses to 13. iOS 26 also added more full-featured boarding passes and brought Apple Cash to group chats.
9. Apple Maps is an unusual “service” for Apple to highlight, as it’s one of the few that doesn’t seem to directly make any money for the company (at least not yet). Still, Cue took the opportunity to mention how it “made users’ Preferred Routes and Visited Places easily accessible using on-device intelligence,” and expansions of the Detailed City Experience to new locations like New Orleans, Singapore, and Monaco.
10. Find My is another service that we don’t hear talked about much in the same breath as Apple TV and Apple Music, but Apple highlighted its recent initiative to partner with airlines for finding lost baggage, noting that it’s now supported by 36 carriers, and has reduced unrecoverable luggage by 90 percent.
    

At-a-Glance: Apple Services in 2025

While 2025 was a record-breaking year for Apple Services, it may just the beginning. While Apple’s playbook until now has been about attracting more subscribers, expanding to more countries, and providing more content, the rise of Apple Intelligence and impending Siri improvements mean the next decade will almost certainly see Apple pivoting to enhancing its services with a more AI-driven but still human-first approach, much like the way it’s brought Fitness+ to more countries through generative voice dubbing.